Re: HTTP Extensions for Simultaneous Download from Multiple Mirrors

On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 5:03 PM, Henrik Nordstrom <
henrik@henriknordstrom.net> wrote:

> This draft made a bit of surprise appearance in the transport area
> meeting today:
>
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ford-http-multi-server
>
> My initial reaction is lots of obvious overlap with other work and
> misunderstandings of basic HTTP functions like ETag.
>
> Basic motivation behind the work may be reasonable however.
>
> I will try to catch the author for a more in-depth discussion shortly.
>
> Other opinions?
>

Sounds like a job for a Link relation (rel="replica"... I'm not convinced
rel="self" is appropriate), perhaps some additional, optional attributes
(e.g. country=us) and existing headers (e.g. Content-MD5).

There's probably a lot to be learnt from protocols like BitTorrent too.

Sam